While everyone else is away at Cereals (my first year off for a while!) I’d like to take a sneaky moment to share some of my joys from last weekend’s bird surveying (and some doubts over next weekend’s surveys on the coast if this weather continues).
I’ve been getting snappy with my camera, it is nothing special, a little point & shoot job, but that just makes me relish the challenge of getting a close up more!
Last weekend, I was busy mapping birds around one of the farms taking part in this year’s Volunteer & Farmer Alliance project- where RSPB Volunteers survey a local farm three times during the breeding season, whilst also collecting close up shots of all the flowers in the cultivated margins around the spectacular farm I was surveying.
This farm has it a bit easier than some on the arable flora front- as it is in the heart of the Brecks- famous for its flora, and the light soils are perfect for cultivated margins, the both help to provide some summer food for birds- weed seed food for species like linnet & turtle dove, while attracting insects to provide invertebrate chick food for a wide range of farmland birds. And at the same time, they are protecting and encouraging rare arable flora- or ‘weeds’. against a south facing woodland edge, the buzz from the bees was frenetic on this field.
Here are some of my favourites from the day.
Another thing which struck me with this farm, as with my other survey on the north Norfolk coast, was the sheer diversity of bird species using it- I think it is undoubtedly helped by the mixed farming system, and presence of water- in ditches and also wet meadows & ponds.
Feeding on the grassland were two large family groups of mistle thrush, and a pair of barn owls had managed to raise some chicks, which were still in the box provided for them. There were plenty of owl pellets under every large oak, with natural hollows. The linnets had started to flock, and there were two large groups, about 40 in total- on the oil seed rape.
A huge racket came from the woodland edge, between a pine plantation and a field of parsnips, and it was a cacophony of tits and chaffinches, and there up on a high branch one of this year’s cuckoos!
Next weekend will be north Norfolk, if the weather holds- last time the whole family came and I snuck out from the tent, pitched at an adjacent campsite, to survey over 120hectares before breakfast!
Another delight- but I won’t give the game away just yet.
Did I see some fresh straw being hauled yesterday- has this year’s winter barley harvest started already? ?.